With new club coming, new nonprofit, local jazz scene is set for revival

The impermanence is the thing. 

For a culture that records and shares fleeting moments like so many Skittles and marketers who aim to ape spontaneity through planning and precision, inspired and fleeting moments can be a rare and cherished commodity.

Except it’s not rare at R Wine Bar & Kitchen.

Aside from an eight-month COVID pause, the East Eighth Street hangout has held a jazz night every Thursday since its opening in late 2018. 

Week after week, strings of notes and melody improvised into existence and destined to live on only in memory and feeling float through the heady air, occasionally escaping through the doors as patrons enter or exit. 

It can be as intoxicating as it is rare. At least it is for Dan Heier, a drummer and frequent player at R Wine Bar and co-founder of the just-launched Fellowship Jazz Center.

Any live event has an element of the ephemeral, but the emphasis on improvisation in jazz takes it to another level.

“What happens tonight is something that’s never going to happen again,” the drummer said. “Those notes will never come together that same way, and you have to be there to be a part of it.”

Heier and his Fellowship Jazz Center co-founder, trumpeter Jim Speirs, want to nurture the next generation of musicians and fans through education, outreach and performance.

R Wine Bar and its soon-to-open cousin, Trio Jazz Club, are a big part of the story. For the past five years, Heier has been the primary organizer of another R Wine Bar jazz staple: the first-Wednesday jam night.

On those nights, anyone with an instrument and a will to join the band can sit in and tear through a solo or two. Those events will take on a new role with the emergence of the Fellowship Jazz Center.

The idea, which had its first iteration May 1, is to start the evening with an hour or so of jazz instruction with a professional player for musicians of all ages, then move to a performance space to give them a chance to try out their new skills.

The first event featured Willie Murilla, a session trumpeter based in Los Angeles.

“We had a fifth grader there, all the way up to someone who was in their 60s,” said Heier, who teaches percussion between gigs with the National Guard band and various jazz groups. “It’s really for everyone.”

There’s more education and outreach to come, though Heier said the center is in “discovery mode” to figure out what that might look like. 

One model could resemble the Jazz Diversity Project, which brought jazz education to elementary and middle school students during social studies classes.

For the group’s launch last month, the center partnered with the State Theatre for showings of “Miles Ahead,” a 2015 biopic starring Don Cheadle as Miles Davis.

At the end of April, the center organized a “jazz crawl,” with groups playing in five locations on Eighth Street.

Live performances always will be a key component in the center’s mission, Heier said. The nonprofit group’s website lists upcoming performances across town and works to secure talent for various venues.

Gene McGowan & Friends regularly performs at The History Club of Sioux Falls, promoted by the center. That event started as the pianist’s annual birthday jam session and became a public performance last year.

The emergence of the center is meant in part to fill the void left by the disappearance of the Sioux Falls Jazz & Blues Society. That came a few years after the end of JazzFest, the free weekend of music in Yankton Trail Park. 

Five years removed from the last JazzFest, the city is, ironically enough, more ready than it ever has been to embrace live jazz.

Riccardo Tarabelsi’s banking on it. He and his wife, Marybeth, own R Wine Bar, as well as Maribella Ristorante and Vespa Catering. The Trio Jazz Club will be right next door to Maribella in Washington Square, with live jazz five nights a week.

Almost all the jazz will migrate from R Wine Bar to Trio, though R will host the Hegg Brothers every Friday and a variety of acts on Saturdays.

After almost six years of live jazz at R Wine Bar, Tarabelsi believes Sioux Falls can sustain a full-on jazz club of its own.

The fans, he said, are dedicated.

“There are some Thursdays where we have an all-out blizzard, but we have a jazz night, and people still show up,” Tarabelsi said.

And live is the way to experience it, he said. The passion of the players and the way the mood of the room or the personality of the musicians color the way a song takes shape, the inspired licks and the wrong notes that “no one hears but the bass player” are all elements that separate jazz from other art forms.

If you’ve never been in the room for a jazz show, Tarabelsi said, it’s worth a try.

“It’s one thing to hear it. It’s another thing to experience it,” he said. “We’ve had so many people come in over the years on a jazz night and go ‘I didn’t know I was a fan of jazz until tonight.’”